Sunday, April 22, 2018

OMG The Stupid It Burns

This article, pointed out by @TheGrugq, is stupid enough that it's worth rebutting.

“The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the positions of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.” <- I sincerely hope so… “the cyber guns of August” https://t.co/xdybbr5B0E

The article starts with the question "Why did the lessons of Stuxnet, Wannacry, Heartbleed and Shamoon go unheeded?". It then proceeds to ignore the lessons of those things.

Some of the actual lessons should be things like how Stuxnet crossed air gaps, how Wannacry spread through flat Windows networking, how Heartbleed comes from technical debt, and how Shamoon furthers state aims by causing damage.

But this article doesn't cover the technical lessons. Instead, it thinks the lesson should be the moral lesson, that we should take these things more seriously. But that's stupid. It's the sort of lesson people teach you that know nothing about the topic. When you have nothing of value to contribute to a topic you can always take the moral high road and criticize everyone for being morally weak for not taking it more seriously. Obviously, since doctors haven't cured cancer yet, it's because they don't take the problem seriously.

The article continues to ignore the lesson of these cyber attacks and instead regales us with a list of military lessons from WW I and WW II. This makes the same flaw that many in the military make, trying to understand cyber through analogies with the real world. It's not that such lessons could have no value, it's that this article contains a poor list of them. It seems to consist of a random list of events that appeal to the author rather than events that have bearing on cybersecurity.

Then, in case we don't get the point, the article bullies us with hyperbole, cliches, buzzwords, bombastic language, famous quotes, and citations. It's hard to see how most of them actually apply to the text. Rather, it seems like they are included simply because he really really likes them.

The article invests much effort in discussing the buzzword "OODA loop". Most attacks in cyberspace don't have one. Instead, attackers flail around, trying lots of random things, overcoming defense with brute-force rather than an understanding of what's going on. That's obviously the case with Wannacry: it was an accident, with the perpetrator experimenting with what would happen if they added the ETERNALBLUE exploit to their existing ransomware code. The consequence was beyond anybody's ability to predict.

You might claim that this is just the first stage, that they'll loop around, observe Wannacry's effects, orient themselves, decide, then act upon what they learned. Nope. Wannacry burned the exploit. It's essentially removed any vulnerable systems from the public Internet, thereby making it impossible to use what they learned. It's still active a year later, with infected systems behind firewalls busily scanning the Internet so that if you put a new system online that's vulnerable, it'll be taken offline within a few hours, before any other evildoer can take advantage of it.

See what I'm doing here? Learning the actual lessons of things like Wannacry? The thing the above article fails to do??

The article has a humorous paragraph on "defense in depth", misunderstanding the term. To be fair, it's the cybersecurity industry's fault: they adopted then redefined the term. That's why there's two separate articles on Wikipedia: one for the old military term (as used in this article) and one for the new cybersecurity term.

As used in the cybersecurity industry, "defense in depth" means having multiple layers of security. Many organizations put all their defensive efforts on the perimeter, and none inside a network. The idea of "defense in depth" is to put more defenses inside the network. For example, instead of just one firewall at the edge of the network, put firewalls inside the network to segment different subnetworks from each other, so that a ransomware infection in the customer support computers doesn't spread to sales and marketing computers.

The article talks about exploiting WiFi chips to bypass the defense in depth measures like browser sandboxes. This is conflating different types of attacks. A WiFi attack is usually considered a local attack, from somebody next to you in bar, rather than a remote attack from a server in Russia. Moreover, far from disproving "defense in depth" such WiFi attacks highlight the need for it. Namely, phones need to be designed so that successful exploitation of other microprocessors (namely, the WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular baseband chips) can't directly compromise the host system. In other words, once exploited with "Broadpwn", a hacker would need to extend the exploit chain with another vulnerability in the hosts Broadcom WiFi driver rather than immediately exploiting a DMA attack across PCIe. This suggests that if PCIe is used to interface to peripherals in the phone that an IOMMU be used, for "defense in depth".

Cybersecurity is a young field. There are lots of useful things that outsider non-techies can teach us. Lessons from military history would be well-received.

But that's not this story. Instead, this story is by an outsider telling us we don't know what we are doing, that they do, and then proceeds to prove they don't know what they are doing. Their argument is based on a moral suasion and bullying us with what appears on the surface to be intellectual rigor, but which is in fact devoid of anything smart.

My fear, here, is that I'm going to be in a meeting where somebody has read this pretentious garbage, explaining to me why "defense in depth" is wrong and how we need to OODA faster. I'd rather nip this in the bud, pointing out if you found anything interesting from that article, you are wrong.